Kominicki: The flu of 1918 back story

The killer flu of 1918 reached full biological potency in the World War I trenches of eastern France, just as American troops arrived in force to get it over, over there.

What started that spring as run-of-the-mill influenza grew progressively more virulent as it spread among the waves of new “hosts” – the healthy, young soldiers in which the bug could reproduce and adapt before fresh recruits arrived to keep the process percolating.

Returning doughboys carried the super-flu to Boston in August, and it quickly spread to draftees heading for the Army’s main debarkation point for France: Camp Upton in Yaphank, Long Island.

It arrived here on Sept. 13, sending 38 troops to the infirmary, followed by 86 the next day and almost 200 the next. Within a month, the wards were filled with more than 6,000 men suffering from influenza or a follow-on pneumonia that turned patients such an ashen blue, physicians could diagnose without bothering to listen to the lungs.

Other symptoms: Ruptures of the mucous membranes that caused wholesale bleeding from the nose, ears and stomach. The pneumonia also caused massive hemorrhages that turned the bronchial tissue black.

The sight, one doctor wrote, “will haunt for life the minds of those who saw it.”

The camp commander finally limited visitors to Upton in October, still pooh-poohing the severity of the outbreak to reporters from The New York Times. But too late: The virus had already spread to Camp Grant in Illinois, where it would infect a quarter of the post’s 40,000 troops and kill more than 1,000.

Out there, camp commander Col. Charles Hagadorn was so distressed by the deaths that he committed suicide with a pistol shot to the head.

The virus then raced the globe with the speed of a Michael Crichton thriller, fueled by infection rates of up to 50 percent. While previous flu epidemics had a modest 0.1 percent mortality rate, the 1918 outbreak would kill 10 percent of those infected – double that in some places – topping the fabled, century-long Black Death of the 1300s.

The final math: 500 million infected by the flu, 50 million dead, 3 percent of the world’s population wiped out in a matter of months. Only the remote island of Marajo in the Amazon delta was spared fatalities.

Although medical researchers still refer to it as “the greatest medical holocaust in history,” the outbreak went largely unreported by the media of the time, although newspapers did regularly run ads for the wide assortment of snake oils that claimed themselves as cures. The grippe of 1918 was quickly, and quite remarkably, forgotten.

As a result, Camp Upton is better remembered for activities taking place outside the infirmary in 1918, most notably a benefit musical review penned by a Russian-born draftee named Israel Baline.

Called “Yip, Yip Yaphank,” the show’s goal was to raise $35,000 for a new community center at the base, where family members, including those hoping to visit their flu-ravaged sons, could rest up following the dusty trip through Long Island’s potato fields.

The show previewed at the camp’s tiny Liberty Theatre before a crowd of military brass and 70 New York celebrities – Al Johnson, Fanny Brice and Will Rogers among them – who had been railed out by private train. The show’s hit tune, “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” was performed by Baline himself.

Another song written for the show, “God Bless America,” was cut by the author for being too patriotically “sticky.”

The production then moved on to Broadway, where it earned the Army a whopping $80,000, including $10,000 from Anheuser-Busch, which got a song extolling Bevo, its “cooling and invigorating” non-alcoholic wartime beer.

Baline, who renamed himself Irving Berlin, would write another 16 Broadway shows and more than 1,200 songs, including the top-selling tune of all time, “White Christmas.” He died at the age of 101 in 1989.